Politics

Two weeks after Election Day, it appears the partisan makeup of the new House of Representatives will be 234 Republicans and 201 Democrats, although the outcome is not yet official in two states.

One result that did become clear on Tuesday: Republican Rep. Allen West, a Tea Party favorite, conceded to Democrat Patrick Murphy in Florida.

Unresolved races remain in Louisiana and North Carolina.

A new district map forced two Republican incumbents to run against each other in Louisiana. They will meet in a runoff on Dec. 8.

Two weeks after votes were cast, Tea Party firebrand Allen West conceded he lost his Florida Congressional race to Democrat Patrick Murphy. He was one of just a few Tea Party activists to be defeated.

According to scientists, the Earth is about 4.5 billion years old. Most of the people who vote in presidential primaries aren't scientists, however.

Indeed, a Gallup poll this year reported that 46 percent of Americans (58 percent of Republicans, 41 percent of Democrats and 39 percent of independents) held a nonscientific belief in creationism, the religious-based view that humans were divinely created within the past 10,000 years.

A Florida judge on Friday denied Republican Rep. Allen West's last-ditch bid for a recount of early-voting ballots in the close and ugly re-election race he is losing to Democrat Patrick Murphy.

West's effort to wrest the race from Murphy, who is leading in a race that has yet to be officially called, now goes to the St. Lucie County elections board, which was scheduled to review his complaint late Friday.

It was unclear when it would rule.

Transcript

IRA FLATOW, HOST:

This is SCIENCE FRIDAY. I'm Ira Flatow. If you're a political junkie, I'm guessing a couple of words will make your skin crawl: hanging chads. Or you might like pregnant chads or whatever - we didn't know what a chad was before then. After the problems counting ballots in the 2000 election in Florida, municipalities around the country moved to adopt electronic voting systems with the thought that they would be easier to use, more straightforward to count.

Some Democrats complain that Republicans in recent decades have had the edge in House races because GOP state legislatures have been better at the gerrymandering game. Except that may not be true.

Some political experts believe there's an easier explanation, and perhaps a tougher one for Democrats to overcome: Voters supporting Republican House candidates, they say, are spread over more congressional districts than those who support Democrats. It's that simple. It's merely a matter of geography.